Pope County Coroner Leonard Krout attended the Arkansas Rx Drug Abuse Summit on June 18 in Little Rock and came back with both shocking and informative information about illegal drug use.

The summit addressed the growing problem of prescription drug abuse and discussed ways to remedy the situation.

A major draw of prescription drugs is the simple fact they are worth a lot of money on the street, he said.

“I think the most important thing was the Drug Enforcement Agent (DEA) agent who spoke, Dr. Joseph T. Rannazzisi,” Krout said. “He actually summed everything up. He said that one milligram equals $1; so a 30 milligram tablet is worth $30, minimum.”

This price is for prescription drugs, such as oxycodone, hydrocodone and xanex. Krout said drugs like cocaine sell for a lesser price on the streets.

“A kilo of cocaine on the street right now is anywhere between $18,000 to $32,000,” Krout said, “So [prescription drugs] are the next big thing.”

The high price of prescription drugs can lead to the creation of pill mills.

“These are doctors that have decided to go in that direction,” Krout said. “They can make up to $30,000 a day.”

Krout said pill mills are detected by looking for triangulation. This means people from another state are coming here to doctors who will prescribe them medicine. The prescriptions are then filled in the other state, completing the triangle.

“Between September 2012 and now, 26 million oxycodones were prescribed in Arkansas,” Krout said. “Our population is only 2.8 million, so that kind of freaked me out right there.”

Another problem discussed at the summit was the recent trend of smoking alcohol. Krout said this can be done in a few different ways.

One way is by pouring alcohol over dry ice and breathing in the vapors. Another way is pouring alcohol into a two-liter bottle and using a bicycle pump to build up pressure. This allows the vapors to goup into the mouth placed over the bottle.

“The part about that that’s so dangerous is that when you drink alcohol, your body reaches a toxicity level where, you can still die, but your body actually begins to vomit it up,” Krout said. “With this, it can’t. Your brain goes into overload, it can’t disperse it fast enough and pretty soon they’ll just end up dying.”

Krout said it was important for this information to be known by people in his profession because they are the ones who will take samples from the body.

“That’s how we found our little pill mill here,” Krout said. “We saw an increase in our average of zero to two overdose deaths. When you have six or eight a year, something is wrong.”

Arkansas started a prescription drug monitoring program in 2012. It is a statewide database that allows law enforcement, pharmacists and medical personnel to log in and access prescription information.

“We’re looking into getting them to allow us into the database,” Krout said. “When we had our pill mill, I literally had to go from pharmacy to pharmacy submitting a subpoena for their records on this particular physician. It was just time consuming.” Krout said he hopes the database will lead to breaking up pill mills.

“Criminals always think of a way to get over the system, but I think they’re hoping to get this thing set up where everything can be tracked,” he said.

Krout said that overall the conference was very educational.

“I’m one of these that thinks you can never have too much information,” he said.